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Open Source Graphic Card Project Seeks Experts
An anonymous reader writes "Could this dream of many open source developers and users finally happen? A 100% open sourced graphic card with 3D support? Proper 3D card support for OpenBSD, NetBSD and other minority operating systems? A company named Tech Source will try to make it happen. You can download the preliminary specs for the card here (pdf). The project, though a commercial one, wants to become a true community project and encourages experts and everyone who have good ideas to add to the development process to join the mailing list. You can also sign a petition and tell how much you would be willing to pay for the final product."
If you'd read-up on this subject, you'd have seen that these folk *do* know their hardware.
They are also not being overly ambitious. While they expect to be able to develop a card which has 3D accelleration for desktop applications, they make no bold claims about gaming.
Indeed, this card is being designed as the ideal desktop-card for open-source systems with open-source drivers and firmware. Any gaming performance, while unlikely, should be treated as a bonus.
I have already pledged my intention to buy one of these cards just out of curiosity.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I think the company would make a ton of money just making these as a reference platform and selling them to University students looking for a way to program their own GPU on the cheap for research purposes. Heck, Xilinx should do it themselves, and give all these students exposure to Xilinx parts (and their crappy design software) before they even find out who Altera is.
This project looks interesting. I'd sign on to help out, but this gets dangerously close to what my Day Job is, and I don't think my management would smile on my participation...
tech source makes graphics cards for sun microsystems computers, i've got a raptor in one of my ultrasparc10's. I'm sure they have some fabrication experience, just visit their website, they've got quite a few products.
If you read the mailing list archive, you'll see that what they are proposing is a card with simple, OpenGL compatible 3D. The interface will be PCI at first. My impression is that they have mini-ITX boards in mind. The last paragraph of your post is correct: they will probably target commodity Linux (and significantly, BSD) boxes.
I think that this is a great idea. Right now, if you want open source 3D, the only good hardware available is the Matrox G400/450/550 line, and that's over 5 years old. I bought my G450 in 1999 and am still using it quite happily, but I would certainly buy an open hardware card from Tech Source if this project comes to fruition.
As someone on OSNews posted, this project could be profitable for a small company even if it would be considered a flop by ATI or Nvidia.
Talk about "false logic." Open Office is doing pretty well because it has had a huge amount of time and money put into it over the years. By the way, it existed for many years as closed source before it became open source, even before Sun bought it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
And it's not anywhere near being ready to replace Microsoft Office, but I guess they've only had 10 years...
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I am glancing at the specs and I have a couple thoughts.
The first is that these are respectable specs - providing you don't want to to any gaming.
I think that is a really important caveat. I know that every once in a while people get all excited because the usual suspects port there games to Linux - you know ID and Blizzard come to mind.
It is a good thing that these two companies do this, but it is a bad thing that there are really only two companies that do this with anything approaching reliability.
Thing is... a card with these specs, especially considering that it is a year if not more away from reality will never cut it for any sort of gaming. You are going to produce a card with 3D support that doesn't have the muscle to handle any 3d games that are produced.
If you are fine with that then there is nothing wrong with those specs. This card will be able to handle email, porn and movies as well as anything ATI produces.
My 2nd thought is a bit more practicle.
Actually there may not be anything practicle about it. Might just be wishful thinking really.
What about 3DFX? What about OPENGL?
Between the two things isn't half the work already done?
I know it might seem insane - nuts even, but back in the day 3dFX had some very respectible hardware. They didn't fail cause there stuff was poop, they failed cause they underestimated nVidia (which in turn underestimated ATI). The hardware is still out there, the code is still out there. It just isn't being utilized.
Would there be anything wrong with utilizing these old resources to achieve this goal?
No, OpenGL isn't exclusively 3D, but the parts of it being used by Apple are.
Also, Quartz Extreme is most definitely using 3D hardware acceleration. Regular "old" Quartz used before 10.2 was purely 2D based, but Quartz Extreme leverages your 3D accelerator to render the desktop on screen - acting like "Everything is a textured polygon."
Much of what you're saying is true about reprogrammable (Xilinx, Altera) FPGAs, but this "open source video card" would be an excellent application for one-time-programmable (antifuse) FPGAs, like the chips made by Actel or QuickLogic. Once the FPGA code has been written, there shouldn't be any need for reprogrammability, and antifuse FPGAs are cheaper, faster, and have much better routing potential than reprogrammable FPGAs. In fact antifuse FPGAs can come very close to the speed of an ASIC.
I'm actually quite surprised that they're opting for a Xilinx FPGA here; I must be missing something. Is there any particular reason that reprogrammability is more important than cost and speed for this?
I hate to say it, but your logic is completely wrong. Although OpenGL is an open standard, current cards all have vendor specific extensions for handling such things as multiple texture blending and vertex/pixel shaders. Also, the effort required to write an OpenGL driver is significantly greater than writing a DirectX driver.
The Windows driver for a DirectX card is not that complex - and there are several available reference sources (3Dlabs, ATI). The highly complex drivers out there at the moment are very heavily optimized for a given card - speed sells. But the central core of the driver is simple, with almost all work handled by one entry point that takes command batches.
I ought to know - I'm the guy that designed the Windows kernel interface to the driver back in '97, and it's basically unchanged to this day.